Cargo ship Marine Angel navigating the Chicago River in 1953. Via History Calendar . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week: damage to the Ras Laffan LNG facility, housing bubble risks, North Korea’s naval production, Bezos’ $100 billion for manufacturing automation, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. War in Iran Ras Laffa...

Moving stuff off my personal machine to my new ThinkPad (and clearing up a bunch of state while I’m at it) lead me to a folder of webloc files I must have dragged to my desktop at some point. Turns out, they’re just regular Apple plist files in XML: URL https://rubenerd.com/ Apple plists can store any arbitrary data pairs, but in this case the element includes the URL I would want to preserve. So I definitely didn’t brute force extracting them...

Today I posted a video titled The best laptop Apple ever made , and tl;dw 1 it's the 11" MacBook Air. I acknowledge in the video my pick is slightly subjective, and I also asked a number of other YouTubers which Mac laptop they consider the best (or at least most influential). If you don't want to watch the video, I'll summarize their choices here: Today I posted a video titled The best laptop Apple ever made , and tl;dw 1 it's the 11" MacBook Air. I acknowledge in the...

TL;DR; Chameleon-robyn is a new Python package I created that brings Chameleon template support to the Robyn web framework . If you prefer Chameleon’s structured, HTML-first approach over Jinja and want to try Robyn’s Rust-powered performance, this package bridges the two. People who have known me for a while know that I’m very much not a fan of the Jinja templating language . Neither am I a fan of the Django templating language , since it’s very similar. I dislike the fac...

Creating a Kahoot quiz takes about five minutes from login to finished game. You need a Kahoot account, a topic, and a few questions ready to go. The process is identical whether you're running a classroom review, a team training session, or a trivia game with friends. Here's how to do it, step by step. How to Create a Kahoot Quiz: The Full Process Head to create.kahoot.it and sign in. Supported login methods include Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Clever. Users under 13 in the US, or un...

Consensus Board Game Mar 19, 2026 I have an early adulthood trauma from struggling to understand consensus amidst a myriad of poor explanations. I am overcompensating for that by adding my own attempts to the fray. Today, I want to draw a series of pictures which could be helpful. You can see this post as a set of missing illustrations for Notes on Paxos , or, alternatively, you can view that post as a more formal narrative counter-part for the present one. The idea comes from my m...

Recognize the value of your time and choose activities wisely. Figure out how to deal with escapism. Recognize the value of your time and choose activities wisely. Figure out how to deal with escapism.

.article-entry img { max-height: 360px; width: auto; max-width: 100%; margin: 1.5rem auto; display: block; border-radius: 8px; } I’ve learned over the years that shipping fast compounds exponentially only if you’re also learning fast. .article-entry img { max-height: 360px; width: auto; max-width: 100%; margin: 1.5rem auto; display: block; border-radius: 8px; } I’ve learned over the years that shipping fast compounds exponentially only if you’re also learning fast.

I love making incremental improvements to my website . All the changes I make to this website build up to what you see. This has me thinking that websites are both a place to reflect on, discuss, and make change, as well as being something that can, and does, change over and with time. My website grows with me. While exploring my website, I noticed in the past that the bold typeface in the headings and in my website name looked a bit different in Safari to Firefox. This week, I learned why: I ...

So it turns out I didn't like the mustard yellow and steel blue design that I created a couple weeks ago. It just didn't sit well with me, and if I look back over my design history the designs that have stuck over the years are invariably grey with a splash of colour. Problem was, I didn't really know how I was going to redesign the site. Then, one day, I was talking with Sven via email and I visited his blog (also running Pure Blog for the record 🎉), and I immediately knew that was...

Following the 7-step approach and the 1-step approach , and also channelling the spirit of the longstanding tradition of learning how to draw owls on the internet : Think about a subject and then start typing Type the rest of the fucking post and then hit publish Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome. Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to Peo...

Open‑architecture testbed accelerates AI‑driven combat capability   MOJAVE, Calif. (March 19, 2026) – Northrop Grumman’s   (NYSE: NOC) Talon IQ  testbed completed its first partner mission autonomy flight with Shield AI’s Hivemind software, showcasing a ready‑to‑fly platform that accelerates innovation, cuts development costs and eliminates the need to build a dedicated airframe for every new autonomy solution.   Partner-Powered Autonomy:  During the...

Modern processors have the ability to execute many instructions per cycle, on a single core. To be able to execute many instructions per cycle in practice, processors predict branches. I have made the point over the years that modern CPUs have an incredible ability to predict branches . It makes benchmarking difficult because if you test on small datasets, you can get surprising results that might not work on real data. My go-to benchmark is a function like so: while (howmany != 0) { ...

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Gilles Brassard and Charlie Bennett Charlie Bennett and Gilles Brassard will receive the 2025 ACM Turing Award  for their work on the foundations of quantum information science, the first Turing award for quantum. Read all about it in The New York Times , Science and Quanta . Bennett and Brassard famously met in the water off a beach during the 1979 FOCS conference in Puerto Rico. That led to years of collaboration, most notably for their quantum secure key distribution protocol . The ...

I've liked Cryptic Crosswords...somewhat. In the past. They're a bit tricky for me and I haven't really put in the time to be comfortable enough to have fun solving them. Anyway, the Wordle guy has a new website where he aims to teach people how to solve Cryptics. If you're not familiar, Cryptic Crosswords follow a very particular format for their clues. Let's take one of the Parseword examples: Cooked rustic orange (6). The (6) refers to the number of letters in the result. So we...

This post started as a pair of quick answers to questions on r/golang . The first was about whether a repository layer on top of sqlc is worth it . The second was about how to handle transactions when the interface hides storage details . Both turned into short shards on this site. This post ties them together and covers what to do when transactions need to span multiple repositories. It walks through three stages, each building on the last: Put a repository interface between your servi...

The passage of the sun across the sky — dawn, day, dusk, night — drives the clock of life. Some species wake with the sun and sleep with the moon. Others do the opposite, and a few keep odd hours. These naturally driven, 24-hour biological cycles are known as circadian rhythms, and they do more than cue bedtime: They regulate hormones, metabolism, DNA repair, and more. When life falls out of sync… Source The passage of the sun across the sky — dawn, day, dusk, night — drives the clo...

Trees take quite a while to grow. If someone 50 years ago planted a row of oaks or a chestnut tree on your plot of land, you have something that no amount of money or effort can replicate. The only way is to wait. Tree-lined roads, old gardens, houses sheltered by decades of canopy: if you want to start fresh on an empty plot, you will not be able to get that. Because some things just take time. We know this intuitively. We pay premiums for Swiss watches, Hermès bags and old properties ...

David Poll points out the flawed premise of the argument that code review is a bottleneck To be fair, finding defects has always been listed as a goal of code review – Wikipedia will tell you as much. And sure, reviewers do catch bugs. But I think that framing dramatically overstates the bug-catching role and understates everything else code review does. If your review process is primarily a bug-finding mechanism, you’re leaving most of the value on the table. Code review answer...

The big news this morning: Astral to join OpenAI (on the Astral blog) and OpenAI to acquire Astral (the OpenAI announcement). Astral are the company behind uv , ruff , and ty - three increasingly load-bearing open source projects in the Python ecosystem. I have thoughts! The official line from OpenAI and Astral The Astral team will become part of the Codex team at OpenAI. Charlie Marsh has this to say : Open source is at the heart of that impact and the heart of that story; it...

So I’ve been thinking, when was the last time I’ve experienced some sort of burnout from a community. And I had forgotten that tech was not my only interest, or the only thing I’ve been deeply enthralled with. While I started making websites when I was 13, I wasn’t always stuck on only thinking about web development as a hobby and career. I used to be quite obsessed with films and filmmaking. I spent a great chunk of my young adulthood watching films and analysing them. I had semesters...

Hey all, quick update continuing from yesterday's announcement that my homelab went down. This is stream of consciousness and unedited. Enjoy! Turns out the entire homelab didn't go down and two Kubernetes nodes survived the power outage somehow. Two Kubernetes controlplane nodes. Kubernetes really wants there to be an odd number of controlplane nodes and my workloads are too heavy for any single node to run and Longhorn really wants there to be at least three nodes...